Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 25, 2013 @12:30PM
from the pretty-soon-you're-talking-real-money dept.

miller60 writes "The U.S. government keeps finding more data centers. Federal agencies have about 7,000 data centers, according to the latest stats from the ongoing IT consolidation process. The number started at 432 in 1999, but soon began to rise as agencies found more facilities, and exploded once the Obama administration decided to include server closets as well as dedicated data centers. The latest estimate is more than double the 3,300 facilities the government thought it had last year. The process has led to the closure of 484 data centers thus far, with another 855 planned over the next year. The GAO continues to call for the process to look beyond the number of facilities and focus on savings."

The number started at 432 in 1999, but soon began to rise as agencies found more facilities, and exploded once the Obama administration decided to include server closets as well as dedicated data centers.

Much ado about nothing. Looks like someone invested in virtualization got the ear of someone with influence at the GAO.

It seems a little shortsighted to include all office service closets since there are good reasons to keep some data close to the people that work on it so the office doesn't need to shut down when their network connection goes down, plus they get much better fileserver performance on the LAN. Much better to have a replicated fileserver, AD controller, etc in a branch office so they can continue to work even without network connectivity.

If they shut down every server closet they may end up saving money on da

It's not 100%, but business class lines guarantee 99.9% connectivity. Not really a concern, or the cloud concept would've died long ago. Nobody walks over and pops in physical cds into their servers anymore I hope.

It's not 100%, but business class lines guarantee 99.9% connectivity. Not really a concern, or the cloud concept would've died long ago. Nobody walks over and pops in physical cds into their servers anymore I hope.

I had 28 hours of downtime spanning 2 business days on my 99.9% T3 line a couple years ago when heavy rains flooded a junction box and took out both the T3 and backup T1's. We have a 10 gigabit pipe into our main fileserver, and now have a 100Mbit link to the internet. Having 700 users accessing files over a 100Mbit link would not give satisfactory performance, and a couple months of 10Gig internet bandwidth would cost more than a small server farm to provide local servers.

The solution to your downtime that i've seen is to have a backup ISP basically with a dynamic DNS failover. Not simple by any means, but do-able. However hosting offsite at least eliminates the dynamic DNS failover piece. It's also true an entire data center can go down, so a part of an advanced redundancy plan for that is to have colo's spread out in geography. I really hope on a business line you don't pay by the gigabit, that would be vicious. And lastly, it makes perfect sense to have 1 local serve

If you count every group of servers stashed in an office somewhere as a "data center", most big companies have thousands. Tech companies may take things slightly more seriously, but big non-tech companies have data scattered everywhere, often in poorly organized network drives full of Excel spreadsheets and Word docs. That's why you end up with things like a petrochemical company losing blueprints [slashdot.org] when an office moves and some random machines get lost in the shuffle.

"If you count every group of servers stashed in an office somewhere as a "data center", most big companies have thousands. "

My office is officially a data center. One of our legacy 2000 servers, with only fan fan still working (barely), has been in my office since January while the main and secondary server rooms undergo renovation. With the fans dead, it makes for a pretty quiet office mate. It also gives me an excuse to keep my office's a/c cranked down low.

We also have a couple of servers that we're not sure where they are. They're on the network, they work fine, we just don't know where they're physically located anymore...

My favorite part is when you find it on the switch, find the cable, follow it into a cable tray, back out under the floor of the facility, up a conduit in the wall and through a hole to the next server room with 300 other lines...Just shoot me.

We had a similar situation, while working at a large bank we migrated all OUR stuff off of an old server onto a shiny new one. We thought we were the only ones using the server, so once we were done we switched it off. Got a call a couple of days later from across the country - please switch the server back on. Someone had written a C++ reporting tool for clearcase and deployed it to the machine, done some whack sort of configuration on the machine to get it to work. When we tried to migrate it to the n

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureauacracy. Slow news day on Slashdot? This is like saying "Congress is screwing up the country again." Well, duh. I could live in a cave and still call that one.

Well, you know how it is. One day somebody figures it'd be handy to store some stuff, so some extra hard drives get bought. Then it'd be handy to set up an old machine to serve the stuff out instead of going in through somebody's shared folder. Then a few more hard drives are added, maybe a UPS. The assemblage is stuck in a corner, maybe next to someone's desk - hey, stick it in that closet down the hall, or in the copy-machine room, or in the unused whatever room next to the break room. Et voilà,

I guess that if you love intercepting & storing people's supposedly _private_ data, then you need more and more data centers to do that. ------ 50 years from now, high school students will be given an assignment to research our current "data interception craze", and those students will have a tough time understanding what happened in 2013. -----

This is more about ad-hoc/inefficient/poorly-maintained storage of stuff on scattered servers, not bulk storage.

The NSA, by contrast, actually has relatively few data centers, just a few large and well-provisioned ones. They're not storing your stuff on random Windows servers parked in the corner of an office, which is more what this initiative is trying to identify and reduce.

Fortunately for the American, government workers are overall inefficient and bad at their jobs. Therefore, I would safely assume that 65% of these data centers are "down for maintenance" and another 30% are experiencing "technical difficulties", meaning the 5% of data centers are actually storing anything.

But alas, not all is lost. Since these government workers at the data centers have little/nothing to do, they hang out on Slashdot.

I refuse to call it a list of 'data centers', because of their changing definition of what a 'data center' is, but you used to be able to get lists from data.gov... unfortunately, they've now got so much stuff in there that it's hard to find much of anything. The project to shut everything down goes by the name FDCCI:

now defined as “a closet,
room, floor or building for the storage, management, and dissemination of data and
information. Such a repository houses computer systems and associated components,
such as database, application, and storage systems and data stores. A data center
generally includes redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data
communications connections, environmental controls (air conditioning, fire suppression)
and special security devices housed in leased (including by cloud providers), owned,
collocated, or stand-alone facilities.

That's the whole problem. American government services are being run on computers that aren't in a secure data center. They just take a box, put it on a server, give it a domain name, and Bob's your uncle. There are no backups being done. There's no backup generator. There aren't multiple upstream providers to ensure they are always connected to the outside world. Stuff that should be in proper data centers is just shoved away in a closet somewhere. With the number of servers they have, they should real

"The number started at 432 in 1999, but soon began to rise as agencies found more facilities, and exploded once the Obama administration decided to include server closets as well as dedicated data centers. The latest estimate is more than double the 3,300 facilities the government thought it had last year."
So basically by redefining what they consider a data center, there was an "explosion" in the statistics. Except they were already paying for all 7000 data centers. If anything, this should make closin

Tell me, with all this and the news of the massive NSA metadata trolling (even outsourcing to private companies), can anyone explain to me why U.S. veterans are waiting for years just to have their medical claims even looked at let alone processed in even the smallest way?

I was working in one department of the government and we were building our own data centre around 2004 because the cost of using the shared services (the group set up for all departments to share IT infrastructure) was astronomical. It was far cheaper for us to build our own data centre, put in new servers, and hire the support staff. Basically the people running the shared services thought that they could charge what ever they wanted because the departments were not able to outsource to anyone else. And